Posted
by
timothy
on Friday February 11, 2011 @02:22AM
from the so-you'll-need-subtitles dept.

dotarray writes "In case you still somehow didn't believe yesterday's news that Duke Nukem Foreverhad been given an MA15+ rating in Australia – effectively evading the notoriously strict censors, GamePron now has confirmation that the Duke has not been edited in any way for an Australian release. Hooray!"

> Age verification question: Do you remember the initial announcement?
February '98. I was disappointed that it didn't make the release date, but I was confident it would be released before summer. ='(.

There is little to no danger that 15-18 year old kids throwing pipe bombs are real cops, even if that were in the game.

The dominate paradigm in the humanities, and much of psychology, is called Social Constructionism [wikipedia.org]. This has come to define feminism (unfortunately) and much of the academy. While no doubt profound, social constructionism has been taken way to far, and has turned into environmental determinism. The humanities are scared silly at any thought that biology may have an important role to play

Yeah, the point is, regardless of the complex issues on what media a society can and does accept into itself, Australia has a "restricted to 18+" category for everything except games, as if sane, mature adults don't play them. This is the reason some very good games had to be artistically neutered for the Australian market (to water it down to the MA15+ category), and why there is a pressure to shoehorn games (like DNF) that are fit for an 18+ categorisation into the MA15+ bin.

Ummm...Gearbox is working on it now. Guys who did borderlands. I was down at their party they did here in Vegas Monday. First six levels fully playable. Of course the event was held at Deja Vu Strip Club too XD

- The game, Duke Nukem 3d. Yes, it's nothing special looking back. But for the time, the technology was very advanced. People playing this game had only just finished playing Doom II and it's ilk, so DN3D was something special there. It's use of humor was something never before seen in the genre, and that it sometimes got just a little raunchy just made it even funnier. It didn't actually have anything even slightly explicit, but by the standards of the time, it was new.

>>>it's nothing special looking back. But for the time, the technology was very advanced

Speak for yourself. I am always impressed what game programmers can squeeze out of sub-100 MHz processors.

Heck even now, watching youtube on a sub-1000 processor is pretty damn impressive. (Points to PowerPC Amiga running at 500 MHz.) Software today is so overbloated, it makes you wonder what could be accomplished with some of the old Atari/Commodore programmers of the 80s (people who knew how to make every b

dncashman just made Duke throw around cash when you pressed 'use.' I suspect it was used by the creators for stress-testing the engine, as every note was a seperate sprite and continuous use would eventually exaust available memory.

Duke Nukem wasn't just about the (admittedly very juvenile) humor and one liners.

It actually had really great gameplay for the time. To this day Duke Nukem ranks right up there as one of my favorite multi-player FPS games.

In part it's because of the variety of weapons - you didn't just have guns but you had things like shrink rays. What other game even since then has actually had the player scale down to a tiny version of themselves and then try to elude the massive pursuers around them....

And then there's the jet-packs. Awesome aerial firefights, or flying up to office buildings high above. In todays modern games you are only begrudgingly allowed to even jump, much less fly outside of something like a helicopter.

But really my favorite part was the pipe-bombs and trip mines. No other game since Duke has done booby trapping nearly as well as Duke, which gave you the option to either trigger a trap yourself (pipe bomb) or have an unwitting enemy set it off themselves (trip mine). Best of all, you could combine both for the ultimate trap of doom.

My favorite memory of all time is an extended jet-pack fight with one other guy between sky-scrapers, which ended when he came up an elevator shaft that I had lined with something like six trip-mines. BOOM.

So I have no idea if the new game will be any good but I think it still carries a lot of the same weapons, thus I am really looking forward to it way more than I should be. If it does come out and you go wandering up the skyscrapers, I'd take the stairs if I were you.

i know it's apples v oranges, but syndicate wars had amazing destructibility... you could even blow water tracts up with nuclear grenades or satellite rain, and the default metal-pipey texture would replace it.

any and every building could be flattened, and if you had good enough weapons you could destroy the whole town.

I, too, remember fondly DN3D and its gameplay did have all those things you mentioned. But I wouldn't expect too much from DNF. My guess, from all game sequels I have seen in recent years, is that it will have well polished graphics with a mediocre gameplay.

It was the same thing with car simulators. I played "Need for Speed - Porsche Unleashed" in 2000 in a 500 MHz Pentium 3 machine with 128 MB memory and a 6 GB hard disk. It was awesome, especially with a force-feedback wheel. It had great playability beca

I remember the good old days when I first dabbled with online gaming, playing Duke3D on TEN (remember that?). This was at a time when MSN Gaming Zone was popular for playing commercial multiplayer games such as Outlaws, Outwars, Jedi Knight etc.

TEN had a 'Mr Bandwidth' character, an alien whose eyes would change colour according to your connection quality. I never got better than orange with my shitty internal modem, but it was still good fun to play a few games of Duke3D, and the idea of playing online w

But really my favorite part was the pipe-bombs and trip mines. No other game since Duke has done booby trapping nearly as well as Duke, which gave you the option to either trigger a trap yourself (pipe bomb) or have an unwitting enemy set it off themselves (trip mine). Best of all, you could combine both for the ultimate trap of doom.

Except, apparently, Half-Life Deathmatch, which has both of those traps and iirc they will blow each other up.

Duke Nukem Forever is news. The game has been in development for longer than some of the people who will play it. The trials, tribulations, and vaporware status have fallen into legend. Wired named it vaporware of the year for something like 3 years straight, before giving it a lifetime achievement award and sending it to bed. It's right up there with "Chinese Democracy" as far as failure to launch / failure to fail goes, except this cost way more money. And even once it was final

Chinese Democracy cost around $14 millions, and Duke Nukem Forever cost up to $30 millions. Now, while Chinese Democracy is the most expensive record ever, DNF is not even in the top 10. [digitalbattle.com] So I'd say Chinese Democracy was far more wasteful (but still a damn good album).

This was the first FPS I really got into (+ the first one I learned mouse+kb for), and the level editor was amazingly easy at the time. Their timing was perfect for consumer network technology around here too where Doom2 or ROTT was still mainly a dialup game for most folks. And, pre-quake, the first video game engine to even attempt stacking levels on top of each other. Sure it was a teleport trick, but at least they tried.

After all these years they could Star Wars prequels this game and I'd still buy it.

Didn't DN3D have true stacked rooms? The theater room above the lobby in the first level is one example. If I had access to the game files, I could load it up on my N900 to double check, but the CD's in a drawer at home:P

Didn't DN3D have true stacked rooms? The theater room above the lobby in the first level is one example. If I had access to the game files, I could load it up on my N900 to double check, but the CD's in a drawer at home:P

Yes, it did, but there was a limitation in the game engine: you couldn't see both rooms at the same time or the game's graphics would bug out.

Some elevators in the game, on the other hand, were a teleporter trick.

I'd say several reasons, and not just nostalgia. 1.-It was one of the first games (and there have been few recently) that threw in copious amounts of pop culture references which was fun. IIRC Bruce Campbell tried to sue for all of his lines they blatantly ripped.

2.-It was one of the first 3D shooters that didn't take itself seriously and this age of CoD MoH WWII "lets storm Normandy AGAIN!" we really really REALLY need that. Realism is fine occasionally but it is a game and games should be above all FUN w

Duke Nukem 3D back in the early 90s was refused classification and had been re-released as a censored version.

There is next to no consistency with the classification board, no logic. The only consistent thing is that most of their reasoning makes little to no sense when they've previously waved through worse games than the one they are classifying at the time.

Not long after the "Atomic" edition of Duke-3D was released in all its glory. No censorship, same game just with 'more'. Makes sense doesnt it?

The funny thing is that it was released uncensored first. The Shareware version was uncensored and got an MA15+ in Feb 1996. Unfortunately the Port Arthur massacre in April got the new right-wing government in hysterics about violent media.

By the time of it's full release in late May, it was apparently unsuitable for MA15+, but rather than making changes to the code, the distributor decided to force the game's in-built parental control mode on. The uncensored game was still on disc, and within days of its r

I remember Duke Nukem 3D having an adults only rating. That title for the time was pushing boundaries. With interactive strippers, heavy profanity and hell, he rips off an aliens head and shits down its neck. Thats what made it great. If even Australia gives this game a 15+ rating how watered down will it be.

The problem with our current video game rating system is that MA15+ is the highest we have. The only other option the classification board has is to refuse the game classification altogether, thereby preventing it from being sold in Australia. This results in things that shouldn't pass a MA15+ rating getting one, because they're not so bad they should be refused classification altogether.

It's also why the idiotic "gotta protect the children!" crowd who oppose a higher rating for video games are showing themselves to be unthinking hypocrites who have zero interest in actually reducing the ease of access to violent or 'harmful' games by minors, and are instead interested only in shoving their own particular moralities down the throat of every adult in the country.

The Classification Board is aware of just how much of a joke it's become. They've figured out that anything remotely popular now has to be given an M15+ rating regardless of content because they've been threatened by state governments to have their mandate pulled if they start trying to censor things. Basically they've become toothless, refuse classification and the media will drag you thought the mud so they'll just rubber stamp any level of violence and nudity even when it should be clearly restricted.

Basically this was the worst possible scenario for former attorney general Michael Atkinson, as 15 yr olds can now legally buy material that should be in the Restricted (R18+) category ironically because Atkinson opposed the introduction of a restricted category for video games. Hell, a 12 or 13 yr old could get it as they dont really do ID checks for M rated films, not to mention parents who dont understand the content that will buy it.

Go look at Australian film in the '70s and '80s. They got away with stuff that I had to see to believe. "Not Quite Hollywood" is a good doco about it. Classifications have got a lot tighter since then.

If you bothered to find out anything, you would have learned that:
1. the classification board is an independent entity, which is why the Pro R rating government has been able to do nothing about the lack of an R rating for games.
2. Restricted is the term for the R rating which can only be sold to people over the age of 18. In other words, it does not mean what you think it means.

On the plus side -- none of the violence causes any harm, or if it does, only in a small portion of individuals. I did a review of media violence research, and was appalled by what I found. Basically, we have two sides. One makes academic arguments, and use the scientific method. Their research does not support the main-stream view. The other side rides on the coat tails of real science, pretends to use the scientific method, but only responds to academic criticism with political arguments. They are almost

No, no. Violent media merely makes people aggressive! And, as we all know, those temporary aggressive thoughts always turn into physical violence! Therefore, games should be banned/censored. Also, teenager's brains haven't completely formed yet, so that automatically means that they are so ignorant that they can't tell the difference between fiction and reality (the same goes for children). This is all very scientific, you see...

Consider that today we have the most depraved violence in history, and the lowest violence rate.

I wouldn't say that, violence has always been pretty depraved throughout history, we just dont write that bit in the history books. We tend to remember the past with rose tinted glasses.

But the second part is true, we have the lowest rates of murders, domestic violence, assaults and several other crimes in the last 100 odd years. Personally I put this down to cultural shifts away from the glorification of ac

You describe the situation for the former A-G as terrible - it's only terrible for him. No-one else gives a fuck as it doesn't matter any more.

Pretty much what I was trying to say mate, you're reading into my melodrama a bit too much. Think of it as twisting the knife in Atkinson's side, his opposition to R18 means that R material is being released as M15.

The Classification Board (Fuck it, we need to rename it back to the Office of Film and Literature Classification) should only offer "ratings advice"

Perhaps the entire industry can finally get it through its head that labeling a game with a stronger rating than "M" is a better alternative than heavy censoring and will not be the death knell of sales for that game. Just because Wal-Mart will not carry it does not mean that the entire pool of gamers will ignore it!

Yes, but it would take the *entire* industry, inclusive of Sony, Nintendo, and MS. They refuse to allow AO games on their systems. So, it's something of a catch-22. If AO games could be proven to sell (and that the negative PR wouldn't be too bad), they might allow AO games. But that can't happen until they consider an AO game...

This is very similar to the PC problem of those giant game boxes from a decade ago. The common misconception was that using smaller boxes (like those we see today) would mean that us near-sighted game nerds would become physically incapable of seeing them on store shelves and would stop buying them. Then one game tried it, and proved that not only it sold anyway, but the companies would save money with less packaging expenses and more units per shipment moved, lowering transport charges overall. It just tak

I would say "there's always the PC", but even that has problems. Almost no retailers will carry an AO game, and I doubt Steam or other digital distributors do so, either. Not only that, but out of the 24 games [esrb.org] that have actually been given an AO rating, the majority of them are Japanese imports, which seems to indicate that nobody in America is really interested in making AO games.

Left 4 dead 2 had zombie corpses despawning before they hit the ground, no decapitations or amputations, no blood or gore.

It's horrendous to play in that condition. The rules are not applied equally either. It depends on which particular censor you get. Studios can of course contest the rating to a higher board which seems to be a little better.

I know I deserve a whoosh for this, but I'm in a pedantic mood So long as we're ignoring the huge figures of people moving here from overseas: Actually, we're the grandchildren of petty theives. The nasty ones all would've been hanged back in England.

Bzzt. The vast majority of convicts sent to British colonies in the 1700s (which includes Australia, and GASP, also America pre-1776!) were petty crooks. Small time thieves, people stealing some food for their family, or general undesirables that managed to piss off the establishment. Serious criminals (murderers and rapists etc.) would most definitely have been executed in England at the time. They wouldn't waste time and money shipping them to the other side of the planet.

Whoa, hold on thar cowboy. At least admit it's a bit disengenuous. Like germany preaching tolerance towards jews. Keep a little historic perspective is all I'm really saying. Like it or not, we're all to some extent a product of our national history.

GNU is submitting the Hurd to the Australian censors tomorrow. As long as the censors don't block it for promoting anti-corporate values they still have a chance of getting in before DNF. However, should the censor request changes, such as the addition of DRM, expect indefinite further delay.

All these articles I read about DNF and how "bad" it is actually just make me want to play it more. I think people have forgotten what an FPS is like when it's not an ultra realistic war/scifi shooter.

Women want to be with him, and men want to be him. He has his own casino; he has his own video game—which took 12 years to create; he complains loudly in a nice touch of meta-humor—and he's getting head from two blonde twins.

They are called the Holsom Twins, modeled after a certain set of child stars, and they love Duke and each other very much... and very graphically.